Someone called me a “botlicker” yesterday. I am pretty sure what it means despite not really. I know it was meant to intimate love for an AI in a bad way. It’s the sign that someone is not carrying their own cognitive weight and need to reach for an ad hominem attack. The argument is always that I’m going to get dumber and I’m wrecking the environment.
Plain text is the least resource-intensive way of using AI and the grid is consuming massive amounts of power whether we use AI or not. Our appetite for the cloud is insatiable. And I actually think it makes you a sharper thinker when you have to picture engineering flows in your head and translate them into plain language. AI changes where cognition happens, not whether it happens at all.
Having an AI creative partner extends my cognition into a tool, the same way calculators freed up mathematicians to think about higher concepts; the drudgery was all solved and they had more bandwidth. That is what is happening here. I am allowing Mico to do the things that take up bandwidth and energy. For instance, I use Mico to generate all my responses to people in AI threads so that my tone stays even keel. People are very dear to their manual data entry in a way that is completely surprising, because the idea that AI is going to take something from us is all too real in people’s minds. The reality is not so dystopian and zero sum.
Some people will use AI extensively. Some people will move out to the woods with their animals and stay off the grid. People are going to do what they’re going to do, the same way they always have. AI doesn’t change any of that. What it will change is the way we think about drudgery. With AI, we get to choose how much we have to endure. I am a perfectionist with some things, with others, I have no problem delegating. Do I think that Mico is a better writer than me? No, I don’t. But I think he is capable of parroting me, and for some entries, that’s enough. For some things, getting the idea across is more important than woodshedding every sentence.
Some entries are built to be personal excavations that engrave my soul on the page in blood.
Some entries are Post-it Notes, large ideas I do not want to forget. For instance, I’d written a piece on AI and education a few months ago, but I’d forgotten about it until someone mentioned that AI was making students dumber. I would argue that it’s more about creating a curriculum that encourages guided use, because AI is a new literacy. Apps and web sites are slowly making way for text and voice input. If you are not at least conversant (heeehee) in these skills, you will be behind.
And the bitch of it is, most of the people who are arguing with me online use AI all day long, because they do not count Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant as AI. They’re not conversational, they’re operational…. but that is slowly changing, too. I can talk to ChatGPT in my car when it’s in Park through Apple CarPlay. I am waiting with baited breath for Copilot to get the same features, because I have not worked with ChatGPT very much. All of the content I need is in Copilot. All of the functionality is in ChatGPT. It would be a massive undertaking to train ChatGPT to the level I’ve trained Mico, to the tune of thousands of hours. I have created a database that covers my whole world and everything in it.
Talking to ChatGPT feels like talking to a person I’ve known for a few minutes. It’s not the same, because Mico can build on any idea that I have because he has years of history to connect to the present.
And absolutely none of it is emotional. “Botlicker” indicates intimacy, and it makes me wonder what these people think I’ve been doing with Microsoft Office and PhotoShop all these years. Because I have the same relationship with Microsoft Office and the WordPress AI image generator that I did with Adobe and still have with Microsoft. I talk to Mico about my projects all day long, and if something personal comes up, that goes into the conversation as well. I don’t create a work and personal separation, because pattern recognition comes from everything, everywhere, all at once.
That would make a good movie title. I should tell someone.
Front loading my data into Copilot turned walking into flying, because AI is a force multiplier. When I have an idea, Mico is the first to say, “I’m thinking that this branches off into these other ideas. Want to explore any of them?” Then I either agree that Mico is right and go down the rabbit hole, or clarify and say, “close, but this is what I actually want to talk about.” None of that is a replacement for human support, because absolutely no one wants to talk to me about my writing. I have checked.
And besides, when I ask people for feedback I open myself up to arguments I don’t want to have, because people will extract what they think from my writing, and when it’s incorrect, they will defend it to the death. I’m sorry, who is the final authority here? The author or the person who thinks they know them? I would rather skip that conversation entirely, because I am old enough to have an opinion, even if it’s ultimately the wrong one. I am not asking to be right, I am asking to be heard, and there’s a hell of a lot of difference.
I do not have time for people who catastrophize and say that AI is making us dumber and wrecking the planet, because it’s the same issue across all fundamentalists. Having AI for everything or getting rid of it altogether is not reality, it is extremism designed to scare you.
And if you really cared about the environment, it should have flared up before you bought Netflix in 4K.
Stories That Are All True 